Pete Townshend: Who I Am. Pete Townshend

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СКАЧАТЬ riffs supported basic lyrics provided by his wife. Steady low bass, chugging rhythms and shrill harmonica solos set the scene for Reed’s whining, wavering, old man’s voice. But there was something absolutely unforgettable about the music, especially when you listened to several albums in series, a little stoned.

      I was also drawn to the jazzier side of R&B, especially at first. I had grown up with Ella, Frank, the Duke and the Count, so I liked Ray Charles, Jimmy Smith and Mose Allison. But I couldn’t play keyboards, had no access to one and was still a fairly rudimentary guitar player. But you didn’t have to be fast or clever to play R&B guitar blues. You had to be prepared to really listen, and ultimately really feel the music. This seemed less absurd for a young middle-class white boy in 1963 than it does today, so I proceeded without difficulty to learn to play the blues, especially rhythmic blues. I loved emulating Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker and Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, and I started to develop my own rhythmic style based on a fusion of theirs.

      If I felt torn, I’m sure the other members of the band felt the same. They had regular jobs. Doug was a bricklayer and a father. Roger worked in a factory that cut tinplate for specialist equipment boxes and recording studio racks. John worked at the local tax office. I was an art student – and I was also becoming a recreational drug user, smoking several times a week. Lately Roger needed to bully me out of bed to get me to gigs. I was often very sarcastic about the music the band members wanted to play, and Doug had to come to my rescue a couple of times when Roger and I nearly came to blows over the musical direction of the group. I kept pushing because I felt that if we didn’t change we’d never appear cool to my art-school friends. On the other hand, the chart-type songs I was trying my hand at writing for us to perform were really quite corny.

      We recorded my first song, ‘It Was You’, in late 1963 at the home studio of Barry Gray, who wrote music for children’s TV puppet series like Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5. Dick James, The Beatles’ co-publisher at the time, heard ‘It Was You’ and signed me to his company.

      I was a guy who thought love would pass him by.

      Then I met you and now I realise

      It was you, who set my heart a-beating.

      I never knew, love would come with our meeting.

      The song was recorded by The Naturals, a Merseybeat-style band (actually from Essex), and a couple of other groups. It wasn’t a hit, but the fact that it was published at all gave me tremendous confidence. I felt I now had a right to speak up about the band’s musical direction, and even get bossy about it. Roger was definitely in charge, but there was a new tension between us. We were both really keen to make it and had our own ideas about how to do so. Still, we developed a grudging respect for one another that would last a lifetime.

      On top of our daily work schedule we were doing gigs every couple of days, sometimes several in a row. Our audience was mainly Mods. A few venues, like the Notre Dame Church Hall in Soho and the Glenlyn Ballroom in Forest Hill, were true Mod strongholds where fashion leaders, called Faces, displayed new outfits and dances like fashion models. Roger and I were probably hipper to what was going on than most because his sister Gillian and her boyfriend were still so solidly in the Mod front line. There were some lovely Irish Mod girls who went to the Goldhawk, the historic music venue in Shepherd’s Bush. I managed, on occasion, to even keep my feet out of paste buckets.

      Tom and Cam were caught dealing pot, and deported, leaving their entire record collection behind in our care. I finally moved into my own place with Barney as my roommate, where we set ourselves up as Tom and Cam’s heirs. For the first fortnight that we shared the flat Barney and I thought we were doing very well looking after ourselves, but it turned out later that the landlord had let Mum in every day to tidy up, vacuum, do the laundry and washing up. She still liked to have a protective, maternal role in my life in a way that, as a young, independent man who had flown the nest, I wasn’t willing to acknowledge. I may not have even wanted her to clean up after me, but of course ‘at least I’d get my washing done’.

      Jimmy Reed played constantly, and some great girls began to show up. If Roger had had difficulty controlling me when I lived at home with my parents, he was in big trouble now. All I wanted to do was get stoned, listen to records, play my guitar and wait for the doorbell to ring. After a hard day at college I would often decide to forget the band altogether, and if Roger had been less forceful I would have stayed home in my cloud of pot smoke.

      We were scheduled to support The Rolling Stones in Putney at the end of December 1963 and I was prepared to be cynical; without hearing them play, I’d decided their reputation must be based on their hairstyles. Instead I was blown away. Our producer, Glyn Johns, introduced me to Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, who were courteous and charming. From the side of the stage I watched them play and became an instant and lifelong fan. Mick was mysteriously attractive and sexually provocative, possibly the first such talisman since Elvis. As Keith Richards waited for the curtain to open he limbered up by swinging his arm like a windmill. A few weeks later we supported them again at Glenlyn Ballroom, and when I noticed that Keith didn’t use the windmill trick again I decided to adopt it.

      A band called The Yardbirds, with Eric Clapton playing lead, was hot, and Roger had seen a rehearsal of a band called The Trident, whose guitar player he raved about – young Jeff Beck. In both cases we had real competition right in our back yard.

      In February we supported The Kinks for the first time at the Goldhawk. They all had long hair, funny outfits, frock coats and frilly shirts, but the Mod girls screamed at them just the same. Their music was powerful, and Dave Davies’s guitar playing was special indeed. I tried some of my new feedback tricks that night and it turned out he was doing the same. Ray Davies was almost as appealing as Mick Jagger, and for the same reasons: he was delicate, slightly androgynous and very sexy. The Kinks were playing quite a few of the same R&B songs that we did, and they somehow managed to be poetic, wistful, witty, wry and furiously petulant all at once. Along with the Stones, I will always regard them as a primary influence.

      That February, John Entwistle heard that another band was also called The Detours, so we came back to Sunnyside Road after a local show and brainstormed band names for hours. Barney suggested The Who; I suggested The Hair. For a while I hung on to my choice (could I have somehow had an intuition that the word ‘Hair’ was going to launch a million hippies a few years later?). Then, on Valentine’s Day 1964 we made our choice.

      We became The Who.

¹ Ascott’s personal manifesto emerges in his course description: ‘The Questioning of Preconceptions. Analytical study of Nature and Machines introduces the student to structure, growth and form, cyclic and serial situations, and environmental problems. These practical activities are complemented by seminars in Cybernetics, Semiotics, Psychology …’ For more details, see www.frieze.com/issue/article/degree_zero

       6 THE WHO

      In 1964 I began playing guitar the way I was always meant to play it. The sound I had favoured until then borrowed liberally from American prodigy Steve Cropper’s guitar solo on ‘Green Onions’ – a cold, deeply menacing, sexual riff. This, I suppose, is how I imagined myself at eighteen. Now, at the flick of a switch the central pickup, which I had set close enough to the strings to almost touch them on my modified Rickenbacker 345S guitar, cut in to boost the signal 100 per cent. The guitar, with a semi-acoustic body I had ‘tuned’ by damping the sound holes with newspaper, began to resonate.

      By April I was so tired and distracted at СКАЧАТЬ